All in a day’s work for Kevin O’Leary
Candidate shows brazen contempt for his party
This was Kevin O’Leary’s Tuesday: He skipped the mandatory all-candidates’ debate in Edmonton, ostensibly because he didn’t like the format, but quite possibly because it was to be held in both official languages, one of which he does not speak.
He was quoted in a newspaper story that morning admitting he had been using a private plane to jet about to campaign events, but only charging his campaign the price of a commercial airline ticket: an apparent violation of Elections Canada rules. His campaign denied it later in the day: he had only taken one private flight, a spokesman said. But by evening the story had changed again. He would continue to use a private plane, he said, but would expense it properly.
A video surfaced of him, half-nude, complaining that the CBC was “run by women,” grumbling that he was forced to work for women (“it’s ridiculous”) and claiming that he “gets back” at them by doing all his Skype interviews for the network with his pants off.
One day. And yet it displayed so much of the signature O’Leary style: the casual disregard for the rules that others live by, the adolescent taste for shock, the carelessness with the facts, the failure to do the most basic homework, and above all the open, brazen contempt for the party he lazily hopes to lead.
There will be many more such days. There are hundreds of hours of video of O’Leary online, and it doesn’t take more than about five minutes to find him saying and doing all sorts of ignorant, nutty, clownishly reactionary things. And while he can try to wave all of these off as “good TV,” the utterances of a character he had created, he cannot disavow the things he says and does on the campaign trail. That is, when he bothers to go on it.
It’s hard to see why O’Leary would need a private plane to get to campaign events. He’s hardly been to any. Of eleven debates since the first week in November, he has participated in three. He has spent most of the campaign, in fact, in the United States, attending to his various business interests, returning to Canada only intermittently. Should he be elected leader he has not only refused to commit to run for a seat in Parliament — he has refused even to say he would live full-time in Canada. What, and give up show business?
Has any other candidate for leader of a national party in a mature democracy ever campaigned for the job from outside the country? It was unusual enough for Michael Ignatieff to aspire to high office in a country he had spent most of his life avoiding. But if “he didn’t come back for you,” at least he came back.
By contrast, the unique selling proposition O’Leary — the Boston Stranger, the Eyewash Rover — is presenting to the Conservatives is: elect me and maybe I’ll mention you on Shark Tank.
And, it appears, a significant section of the party is ready to take him up on it: he leads in virtually every poll of Conservative members. O’Leary is almost literally phoning it in, offers nothing but his money and his celebrity and his vast cheek as credentials, tells Conservatives they are “losers” and that the party is “irrelevant,” won’t even attend fundraisers unless they meet a $50,000 minimum, and the response of thousands of grassroots Tories is: “Thank you sir, may I carry your bags?”
O’Leary entered the race months late. He has presented virtually nothing in the way of a platform. To the extent his views are known, they tend rather to the left of the spectrum. He does not want Canadian troops used in combat, he told radio host Evan Solomon, ever — a position that would presumably require withdrawing from NATO — but only as peacekeepers; he does not think the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is a threat to Canadians; his favourite news organization in the world is the CBC; and he is “very liberal” on virtually all social issues, including assisted suicide. These may be good ideas or bad ideas, but they are decidedly odd ideas for a candidate for leader of the Conservative party.
The whole campaign has something of the air of an online promotion to it. After the Bombardier bailout, O’Leary’s campaign put out a press release entitled “O’Leary Government Will End Corporate Welfare.” Read further, however, and you found that in fact he was quite willing to provide corporate welfare, but would attach conditions: a “return on investment,” a “productivity dividend,” and so on. In other words, the NDP position.
Then there are the series of just plain crazy things that keep coming out of his mouth — not in some former life, but as a candidate — from the sale of Senate seats to his apparently sincere promise, in the middle of the Manning Conference debate, to punish any province that implements a carbon tax by deducting an amount equivalent to the revenues collected from federal transfers.
He has no experience in politics. He only recently joined the Conservative Party. He can’t speak French, doesn’t think it matters, and isn’t going to learn: it was all his handlers could do to get him to pretend that he would.
He seems unclear on basic principles of economics, such as the difference between the deficit and the debt — though in fairness he says he is pro-free trade and pro-immigration — and shows no more curiosity about other subjects.
Just today, I happened to meet an old university schoolmate of his. “O’Leary,” he grimaced. “He’s made a caricature of capitalism (on his TV shows). Now he’s going to make a caricature of conservatism.” But only if the party lets him.